The Lightning at the Sphinx

Maya sat cross-legged on the hotel room floor, the thunderstorm outside rattling the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Dubai suite. Her flight didn't leave for six hours. Her marriage, she'd realized somewhere over the Atlantic, had ended somewhere over it too.

She'd spent the morning at the pool, reading tarot cards from an app on her phone, then visiting an old woman in the souk who'd traced the lines on her palm with nicotine-stained fingers and said, "You think you're lost, but you're exactly where you need to be." The woman had pressed something into her hand before she left—a small stone sphinx, no larger than a matchbox, its wings worn smooth by countless thumbs.

Now the sphinx sat on the nightstand beside a half-eaten orange, its citrus scent sharp against the sterile hotel air. Maya had peeled it absentmindedly, her fingers still tingling where the palm reader had gripped them, pressing into the life line as if trying to read something written in braille beneath her skin.

Another flash of lightning illuminated the room—a fractured second of stark white that caught her reflection in the darkened window. She looked like a stranger. She'd been so busy becoming the person her husband wanted—promotion-obsessed, socially appropriate, emotionally contained—that she'd forgotten how to be anyone else.

The sphinx seemed to be watching her. In Egyptian mythology, the sphinx asked riddles. What was hers?

Maya stood up and walked to the window. The storm was moving across the city like something alive. She pressed her palm against the glass, feeling the vibration of thunder through her bones. "What do you want?" she whispered to her own reflection. "Really want? Not what you should want. What do you actually want?"

The answer came so easily it frightened her.

She grabbed her phone and booked a different flight—one to Cairo instead of London. She'd visit the real Sphinx. She'd figure out the rest after that. Maybe she'd get a reading from another fortune teller. Maybe she wouldn't.

The orange sat on the nightstand, its bright segments exposed like a secret. Maya ate one piece. It was perfect.